So…What Is Beautiful

Monday 10th September 2012

In today’s perfection-oriented society many young girls have no idea what it really means to be beautiful. Sadly, the average teen’s concept of beauty is what the media chooses to sell them.

From the covers of magazines to TV commercials and glitzy billboards, the celebrities and models get thinner and thinner. In fact models have been getting skinnier for over twenty years now, yet the truth is that ultra-thinness is neither healthy nor appealing.

What’s particularly disturbing, according to a recent Daily Mail report, is that far too many young teenage girls are trying to lose weight. In a study of almost 3,000 youngsters aged 11-14, experts at Queen Mary’s Centre for Child Health, University of London and Great Ormond Street Hospital found that half the girls of 13 and 14 were trying to slim.

While the fear of being overweight was once an obsession with older teenagers and young adults, some girls as young as six are now worried about being fat.  A case in point is that of Taylor Call a six-year-old from Houston, Texas. Surely no one should be concerned about their own shape and size at that tender age?

By contrast, singer Christina Aguilera recently revealed to Lucky Magazine (October 2012 issue) that she loves her body far more now she is curvier than she did when she was much thinner. “Actually the challenge I’ve had is being too thin,” she said. 

The purpose of this article, however, is not media bashing but to ask the question: Wouldn’t it be better if we focused more on self-worth and learnt to value ourselves more highly for what we do and who we are, rather than how we look?

Fashionable clothes are nice, but true beauty comes from within. Whatever the style gurus may say, beauty is primarily a product of happy, fulfilled lives lived well, kindness to those around us, plus healthy balanced eating for growth and mental wellbeing.

Put that together with Jessie-J’s advice when she sang “just be true to who you are” and you have a genuine beauty regime.

Big, small, large, thin it’s not what’s on the outside that counts but rather what’s on the inside. Beneath the layers of make-up and clothes is the real person. Have you been investing in that person?

It really does help to do so, when you want to be beautiful now and stay that way over a lifetime.